The direct manufacturing (DM) process is a layer-additive manufacturing process that can quickly produce complex components by additively depositing layers of material using a high energy beam such as a laser or an electron beam The DM process offers many advantages over traditional fabrication methods such as forging of metallic parts. Particularly, the DM process can significantly reduce the manufacturing lead time by reducing setup and machining time while using substantially less raw materials. These advantages may also provide substantial cost reduction. Because of these advantages, the DM process is routinely used to rapidly produce prototypes and test components by the aerospace industry.
DM is now in transition for use in production articles for which the current industrial production capacity is insufficient. Since the DM process is an additive layering manufacturing process, the fabrication of parts having a large volume of material requires significant deposition machine capacity. Accordingly, what is needed is a method to further reduce the deposition time of large parts using new DM manufacturing processes.